Re: Re: The Brittish Medical Journal is flagged as a fake news blog site
  By: Kurt Weiske to Arelor on Tue Dec 21 2021 08:18 am

 > -=> Arelor wrote to TheCivvie <=-
 > 
 >  Ar> I have migrated my family over to Signal Messenger. They keep their
Facebooks 
 >  Ar> if they want to find me online they are going to have to play with my
rules.
 > 
 > 
 > Ah, Christmastime - time to update grandma's laptop, check the modem, do all 
of th
 > family IT stuff.
 > 
 > It might be time, with family all in one place, to move to a better
 > messaging platform. My family is 25% Android and 75% Apple, so I'd like to
 > get a cross-platform video and secure messaging app going.
 > 
 > 
 > ... Always the first steps

I don't really do free IT for family anymore. My father uses some Linux I set
for him,
so he never getsserious breakages. My mother always was angry at me while I was
fixing
her problems and, once I was done, she kicked me out of the room without
thanking me
or anything, so I stopped fixing things for her.

Signal is nice for text messages and images. It also does voice, but I can't
recommend
it for voice because if your network coverage is not good, it is unusable.

Quality, secure, private videoconferencing is a problem still to be solved imo.
There
is Jitsi, which is FOSS and you could host oyurself if need be. The stack is a
monster
to set (and very dirty if you look at it) so people ends up using public
instances.
The problem is that you end up trusting the administrators of the public
instance you
use. This may be acceptable or not.

Nextcloud talk is workable for 4 or less people. If you are already using
Nextcloud
and have an instance running, adding a Talk install to it may be an option. The
issue
is that stock Nextcloud cannot cope with big conferences (for legit, technical
reasons) and that modifying it to cope with big groups is non trivial (to the
point
people buys a support contract for setting it up).

I am not a fan of videoconferencing myself. It has its uses, but 95% of the time
you
only need audio. Even if you are in a meeting that requires you to deliver
pictures
and diagrams to other participants, many audiochat systems allow doing just
that. I
personally don't think the increased use of bandwidth and the complexity of
implementation for video is worth it for most users*

*Full disclosure, my connectivity sucks so the difference between Mumble and
Jitsi
with video is "It Works Great" vs "The chat is hogging all the bandwith and now
my
mother can't barely browse the web while I am in a virtual meeting"

--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
--- SBBSecho 3.14-Linux
 * Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (618:250/24)